THE PASSAGE by Aashish Kaul@Arts & Opinion

The sounds have long fallen into a rhythm. They emerge – from his nostrils, from his hurried step crunching the dry leaves, faintly, from the metal of the rifle slung over his shoulder as it rubs across his khaki shorts, and there is even a jingle from the few bullets in his pocket – cut each other, and lose themselves like flashes in the wide spaces between the trees that are stark and echoless. The heat fails to touch him, for he shivers and his teeth chatter; but his lips are sealed, allowing neither the saline fluids to enter and sting his tongue nor the sobs to escape. Surely this is all a dream, but how to explain the pain that persists in his shoulder and spreads across his back, obliging him to slow down every now and then? Yet he must keep up his pace; from what he knows of these parts, the brook is at least two miles away.

Barely a year ago, he was still in the village; playing, running errands, and going to the new school. Although not quite taken in by school, he was the last to leave each day, for he had early on made the discovery of some books in the common room where it was always cool and shady. These were strange things, alive to the touch, and he stayed alone, reading and weaving fantasies until light began to leave the sky. He was just beginning to make sense of the words, but the pictures spoke to him openly – of distant lands and times, fishlike maidens and fire-spitting dragons, magic cloaks and tunnels you took to slip into earth’s belly. Only if he had not been dispatched posthaste to live with his uncle in the town. More than once, his family had received feelers from the guerrillas that he was now old enough to handle a gun.

In town he could not go to school immediately: that he had to wait for the term to end was one in many reasons. With each day he grew ever more listless, and when for six months he had not touched a book, it was not difficult to succumb to the offer of becoming a soldier in a new ‘civil resistance’ movement fostered by the authorities to fight the guerrillas, for the allowance was handsome and at last the bookstore lay within easy reach. But without a warning he was removed to the camps on the edge of the forests along the main road to guard the town and resist the advance of the enemy. Here all you saw were khaki clothes, guns and bullets, and some food, but never books. Here, too, was a boy his age who by the third month had become his friend.

Last evening he had found his friend fingering – he could not believe it – a book: hardly outside his grasp, waiting. Beholding it with watery eyes, he moved towards it. But just then there was a shuffle of steps outside the tent, and as if a trance had been broken, he ran away in confusion, though not before hurriedly imploring his friend to bring the book along in the morning to their secret place. Night was spent counting stars, awaiting that one which would make all others disappear. At dawn he was already at the meeting point in the forest, though nearly three hours passed before his friend showed up – he could not comprehend it – empty-handed. Uncontrollable rage welled up in him, making him dizzy; and he came to himself only when he heard the shot.

He falls into the stream with open arms and drinks greedily never noticing the shadows that are thickening over the hill.